Month: June 2023

We did our group 4 project recently and whilst collecting data to create our poster, we also did service by helping remove the water hyacinth from the lake.

I have to admit, I did my usual panic about the possibilities thing before leaving OSC to go to an unfamiliar place and I was very ready to just not go but I eventually overcame my fears after like an hour of agonizing over the potential disasters and I left OSC at around 10 with Ms Harrison.

Everything went relatively well except for the bit of rain towards the end but other than that, it wasn’t even a fraction of what I had imagined up as the ultimate disaster. I also found a couple of damselflies and dragonflies which were cool too.

But the ultimate really cool thing was – we found a leech! An aquatic leech! A Hirudinaria manillensis! I can feel your excitement doubling with each revelation 🙂

Two or three weeks back, the service group was planting tea in the school garden. Now I had missed the session before it so I was caught off-guard a bit but hey, planting a tea plant shouldn’t be that hard! It’s just removing the wrap over the roots and then placing the plant in the soil in a hole and (firmly) patting down the dirt around it.

And it wasn’t really hard in terms of technique but then there was the whole getting your hands dirty bit which put me off a bit, considering I’m not the most “soil” person but I braved through the fears of contracting a tea-related disease and planted a plant – with the help of Eloise who had to show me how to do it first.

But eventually, the plant was planted with almost all of its roots intact and despite being a bit skewed, it looked happy in its new home. I was happy that I didn’t say no in the end too because it really felt cool to actually plant something, especially when you know that the plant technically could be consumed in the future.

But moving on to my not-main activities this semester, specifically, experiences that weren’t really a resounding success – I’m looking back to the end of March where after being hit with inspiration, I really tried to make running on the treadmill a daily thing. I remember this really well because that was the week that I had a Bonding test for chemistry and I was trying to do both of those concurrently (you’ll see the relevance later on).

The first day was actually kind of good but then the next day went terrible because the moment I woke up, my legs hurt. A lot. Importance of warming up. But after like 2-3 days, I persevered and kind of started getting a hang of it. But then I was trying to memorize something for chemistry and I had my notebook open at the front to kind of multitask and then I tripped/missed a step and tried to put my arms in the front so I don’t fall all the way down but then I accidentally banged my head on the front. Which was very upsetting and I didn’t really go back to it after that.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have tried to multitask.

I’m still processing that an entire year has gone by since I first started at OSC but maybe this reflection will help me process!

Creativity

By far, the CAS strand I devoted the most time to this year was creativity. Mostly in the form of the Advocate, the magazine club that I’m finally mostly done editing! I say mostly because we didn’t really get to the layout yet but that’s to be expected with the limited timeframe and limited workforce. But yes, with my estimation, I’d say that next semester, the Advocate would finally be published, whether that be in digital or print.

Activity

Activity is generally not my strong suit. In fact, it’s probably my weakest point because my body and I tend to disagree a lot on things like which limb to move, where to move it to and when to move it. Thus, my main activity experiences this year were DP orientation, DP science trip and WWW. That may not sound like a lot but for someone who gets out of breath walking to their locker, it’s a pretty big deal and required a LOT of perseverance.

Service

Semester 1 of DP1 was generally pretty good for service but semester 2 kind of took a nosedive. My stress levels and overall health went sideways by mid semester 2 and I missed quite a bit of service but for the times I was there, it was good! Two of my most memorable experiences would be the planting and the prep for the assembly which were both really engaging!